Saturday, May 31, 2014

Dirty Bertie: an English King Made in France


The eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, [Albert Edward, nicknamed Bertie,] had a reputation for being the most fashionable man in Paris
writes The Daily Telegraph.
According to [Stephen Clarke's] biography, Dirty Bertie: an English King Made in France, [the Prince of Wales] also had a reputation for sleeping with the city's most famous prostitutes.
 … The prince became King in January 1901. His nephew was Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor from 1888-1918. "Bertie really was the only man in Europe who could calm the Kaiser's warlike outbursts," writes Clarke. "It was on a peace mission to Germany in 1910 that Bertie suffered the attack of cigar-induced breathlessness that would kill him. And as soon as he died, the French began to say that war was inevitable. Bertie, Europe's great peacemaker, was gone."